Just like Eugenia yesterday, I also upgraded my laptop's Ubuntu Feisty installation to Gutsy a few days ago. The upgrade process went completely awry, though, so I was forced to do a fresh install. Not a bad thing, as it gave me the opportunity to take a look at Ubuntu's soon-to-be-released Gutsy Gibbon with GNOME 2.20

"I would say "Your loss, pal!" here. I don't like to mix toolkits as well but I wouldn't settle down with an inferior application just because the better one happens to be coded with the "other toolkit". I mean seriously... Why use any GTK-based music player instead of Amarok, which is hands down the best music player currently available? Why use a Qt vector drawing application when currently there is nothing that beats Inkscape? That reasoning is beyond me..."

Agreed. I think all this fuzz about toolkit wars is total rubbish. Windows Media Player looks totally different from all the other Windows apps and somehow people are fine with that. The latest Office looks totally different from other Windows apps and people are fine with that. Ditto for MSN Messenger. Heck, most commercial Windows apps these days use some kind of custom control or are in some way skinnable, and I don't see people complaining about that.
The difference in looks between GTK and QT is not that great, yet people make a huge deal about this.

It might be total rubbish to you - but it is probably also total rubbish to you that I want my cups' ears in my kitchen cabinets to all point in the same direction. Sure, total rubbish to you, but still, I find it important to give my kitchen a clean and tidy feel.

Windows Media Player looks totally different from all the other Windows apps and somehow people are fine with that. The latest Office looks totally different from other Windows apps and people are fine with that. Ditto for MSN Messenger. Heck, most commercial Windows apps these days use some kind of custom control or are in some way skinnable, and I don't see people complaining about that.

Why do people ALWAYS insist in pointing fingers whenever a person points out a flaw in product xyz? It is COMPLETELY irrelevant.

And in case you want to know: I have complained numerous times about the graphical inconsistency in OSX and Windows. I thoroughly HATE it.

The difference in looks between GTK and QT is not that great, yet people make a huge deal about this.

Way to be superficial. Qt applications do not only look different, they behave different. They have a different layout, different behaviour, differently organised menus, different types of buttons, different types of just about anything.

It's great that you have no problems running them side-by-side. But please don't make it seem as if people who in fact do NOT like it, and have clear reasons for that, are idiots.

I quite agree. My eyes always glaze over when I see people trying to justify the bad design of one application by comparing it to another application with similar design flaws and saying "look, they do it too, it mustn't be all that bad". Windows suffers greatly from UI inconsistencies, OSX less so, but this should be a call for other OSes to get their shit together and make something better. Linux would be much better off if it used a unified toolkit or API for applications, rather than the fragmented mish-mash of GTK, QT and "other" that currently exists. The libraries that drive the UI should conform to consistent standards so that applications will behave and look the same across the board, regardless of which implementation of the standard is used or how the end user configures their UI.

Some people are happy jumbling a pile of different things together; others (like me) have aesthetic sensibilities that value form of equal importance as function.

Why do people ALWAYS insist in pointing fingers whenever a person points out a flaw in product xyz? It is COMPLETELY irrelevant.

And in case you want to know: I have complained numerous times about the graphical inconsistency in OSX and Windows. I thoroughly HATE it.

People are entirely justified in pointing this out. I don't know if you've noticed, but on platforms where you have a wide variety of software, shipped with the OS, from the same vendor or from lots of ISVs, different applications tend to diverge in their relative looks and behaviour. This isn't always a sign that people want to deliberately make things inconsistent, just that different applications do different things and people use different toolkits for the jobs they want to do. You either get a good choice of applications and somewhat diverging integration, or you get far less applications and better integration. The world has spoke - they want applications.

Now, if you'd rather fanny about and have everything written in the same inferior toolkit, minimising the functionality and overall usability of an application, that's entirely up to you.

Way to be superficial. Qt applications do not only look different, they behave different.

Or should that be GTK applications look and behave differently? ;-)

Hell, GTK and Gnome applications can't even look and behave consistently amongst each other let alone with everyone else. Some of Gnome's control panel applets still don't use the abominable instant-apply standard, but you would think they would if they shared a common, stable architecture between them. Running around everything to make it HIG compliant is just not what a modern development desktop is about.

Talking about getting editable toolbars in 2007 is just plain ridiculous, and any Windows or even Mac developer worth his or her salt is going to laugh at you in disbelief. You implement it once in your underlying toolkit or library, and voila, everyone gets exactly the same, consistent thing. It's that simple, or at least it should be.

They have a different layout, different behaviour, differently organised menus, different types of buttons, different types of just about anything.

I'd go and ask the Gnome people why they decided to go off on a Mac trip and make everything inconsistent with Windows, KDE and every Unix desktop that had gone before. There was zero evidence to back that decision up, other than it's the way that the Mac does things.

It's great that you have no problems running them side-by-side.

I don't have problems largely at all. The KDE people came up with a Freedesktop project called QtGTK that allows GTK applications run within KDE to use the same colours and theme, and to an extent, inherit the look and feel of the KDE environment as well (file dialogues etc.) Using Eclipse, Inkscape and VMware Console isn't quite so painful at all now, but in order to maximise the applications you have available on your platform you can't expect perfection.

But please don't make it seem as if people who in fact do NOT like it, and have clear reasons for that, are idiots.

Listen, if you want to have a good bitch about this, and since this article is about Gnome on Ubuntu, why don't you ask some of the Gnome developers what they're doing to adequately solve this problem and what they're doing to integrate Freedesktop software like QtGTK to help with this? There's quite a bit in there for doing the reverse to get KDE and Qt applications integrated into a GTK environment.

Do not bitch at everybody else if the desktop you're using isn't doing anything to help and ease this problem in a sane manner, other than to lamely rewrite applications in a ten year old, inferior toolkit that Windows, Mac and other developers quite frankly wouldn't touch with a ten foot bargepole.